Nancy Postero

Nancy Postero received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2001 and joined the UCSD faculty in September 2001. She was previously a human rights attorney and a journalist. (Click here for CV)

Postero’s research takes three approaches to the study of multiculturalism and neoliberalism in Bolivia. First, in her 2007 book Now We Are Citizens, Indigenous Politics in Postmulticultural Bolivia (Stanford University Press), she examines multiculturalism as a regime of citizenship which acts to include and exclude certain groups.  Comparing this regime to past epochs, she asks how neoliberal policies and practices informed the particular exclusions that marked the era of state-sponsored multiculturalism.  Postero examines these issues from the perspective of the Guaraní people of Santa Cruz, in Bolivia’s Eastern lowlands, with whom she has carried out fieldwork since 1994. Through careful ethnographic studies of the effects of the Law of Popular Participation, local indigenous struggles over land rights, and NGO development projects, she argues that despite the rhetoric of indigenous empowerment, Bolivia’s multicultural reforms of the 1990s reinforced the power of the traditional dominant elite class, political parties, and a new set of patrons, the NGOs.  The striking protagonism of indigenous people in current Bolivian politics since 2000, which she calls “postmulticultural citizenship,” must be understood as having emerged from indigenous engagement with the promises and exclusions of these neoliberal reforms. 

Second, in the 2004 volume The Struggle for Indian Rights in Latin America, co-edited with UCSD sociologist Leon Zamosc, (Sussex Press), Postero makes cross-country comparisons of indigenous struggles across Latin America to find patterns in the complex relations between neoliberalism’s effects and indigenous strategies.

Her most recent work turns to the “post-neoliberal” moment in Bolivia, where the government of indigenous president Evo Morales and his MAS party is promoting an agenda that includes decolonizing society and formulating alternatives to neoliberalism. She has explored various aspects of this new project, including the MAS government’s uses of idealist notions of Andean culture to promote its agenda (LACES 2007), and the interesting and productive tensions within the MAS (Latin American Perspectives, in press).  She has also examining the limitations liberalism may be placing on the MAS’s “radical democracy” project (Latin American Research Review, forthcoming).

She is also writing about the possibilities of a post-neoliberal moment across Latin America.  The Bolivian, Venezuelan, and Ecuadorian cases point to important challenges to neoliberal economic processes.  Does this amount to a more far-reaching transformation in the region? If so, what has changed? Given the neoliberalism was never complete, and always contested, does the “post-“ framework have analytical value?  She is currently co-editing a collected volume on this topic with anthropologist Mark Goodale, following a Wenner Gren-funded conference in 2008 entitled Revolution and New Social Imaginaries in Post-Neoliberal Latin America.

Selected References:

In Press.  Ahora Somos Ciudadanos, Muela del Diablo Press, La Paz, Bolivia.  (Translation into Spanish of Now We Are Citizens)

In Press.  Morales’s MAS Government: Building Indigenous Popular Hegemony in Bolivia. Latin American Perspectives.

2007  Andean Utopias in Evo Morales’s Bolivia. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 2(1):1-28.

2006   Now We Are Citizens, Indigenous Politics in Post-Multicultural Bolivia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

2005 Movimientos indígenas bolivianos: articulaciones y fragmentaciones en búsqueda de multiculturalismo. In Movimientos indígenas y estado en Bolivia, Luis Enrique López y Pablo Regalsky, eds.

2005   La Lucha por los Derechos Indígenas en América Latina, eds. Nancy Grey Postero and Leon Zamosc.  Quito, Ecuador: Abya Yala Press.  (This is the Spanish translation of the English volume.)

2005   Indigenous Responses to Neoliberalism: A Look at the Bolivian Uprising of 2003.  In Political and Legal Anthropology Review (POLAR) 28(1): 73-92.